Week 45: skippin' down 16th avenue (into my) 8th transfer

March 27, 2023

Oh my goodness Taylor Swift has been stuck in my head ALL WEEK. They played Bad Blood at the original KFC and I about frothed at the mouth. Ahahahahaha I can't even say that with a straight face.

Hopefully that brought some enjoyment, as I legit laughed out loud reading that over.

To credit the subject line, I used my bike to proselyte for the first time on my mission. That was pretty fun. I was ridin down 16th avenue while realizing I have virtually no cardio endurance after not having done that for eons. We biked the streets of London for a solid 3 hours. So I guess what can I say, you know you love a London boy.

Ok, I'll stop.

Ahh, I needed to laugh ridiculously there for a second. It was a mentally draining albeit good week. I've just been exhausted the last little bit. BUT, "faint, yet persevering" is my motto, so onward!

Anyways, stream of consciousness bullet points and then I'll describe perhaps the biggest miracle of my mission:

- Staying here another transfer with Elder Barfuss

- They're taking out the Elders though, so I'll be DL over a Sistrict. That'll be a party

- We did the pepper in water with dish soap object lesson with a kid, and his eyes about popped out of his head

- Drove to Louisville and back for New Missionary Training

- Sat through the same New Missionary Training for the 2nd time in 3 months (still good though)

- Two people we interacted with this week read half of the Book of Mormon on their own

- Our mission hit our monthly baptism goal of 25 for the first time since the new mission president in 2020!!! 🥳🎊🥳

Anyways. Miracle time. Ok. So our area is roughly the 3rd largest geographic area in the mission, but it probably has the most population in it (because Louisville and Lexington have like 25-30 missionaries each). We cover roughly 125,000 people and we had a referral come in that promptly cancelled themselves. Anyways, when someone cancels their referral, it redacts all of their information except for their name for data privacy reasons. Well. Basically we weren't planning on it, but we ended up going down to Barbourville on Friday, because we knew we probably wouldn't be able to make it down there for a bit. We had some things planned out, and naturally some things fell through. We pretty much had 2 options. We could either go visit an inactive member's home or go door knocking for a bit. We had already picked out a street off of a prompting from daily planning to door knock, but we weren't sure what we should do. So we prayed (spoiler alert, missionaries pray a lot).

Elder Barfuss felt like we should go door knocking, so that's what we did. We get to the street, park, and then walk all the way down to the end of the street and knock on the last door. A lady opens the door and she like starts talking about her religious background and what not. We introduce the Book of Mormon, and she said that she always wanted to know what it's about. We tell her, and then she says "You know it's really crazy y'all show up here, because I requested people to come out and talk to me about it about a week ago, but cancelled it right away for whatever reason." We were a little confused, and were like "you requested us?"

So we start looking through our records, and sure enough her name is there! Like what! Out of the literally tens of thousands of doors in our area, Heavenly Father led us to knock THIS door for someone He needed us to talk to. She was super interested in everything we had to say, and recognized that it was God bringing us to her when she cancelled the request in her words "for whatever reason."

So that was really cool 🙂. Even if quote on quote nothing comes of it. It was really cool to see that take place, as we had no way of knowing where she lived given the redacted information.

Anyways, this is super long. So props if you read this far.

Now for some pictures: